The curiosity shop is a tailor-made setting for a political cartoon, because the shop
makes a business of showcasing items which-- as in cartooning-- are linked to deeper stories or issues. Each of the objects found throughout the Democratic Curiosity Shop are associated with different elements of Southern/Democratic culture; if general categories were constructed for them, one group would pertain to slavery and another to the Confederacy as a political and military system. (There are also a handful of
stereotypical cracks at the South as a regional culture, like the stuffed alligator and the banjo in the upper-center area of the image.)